Clean air will expose Europe to global warming

Western Europe could face higher temperatures in the next few years as governments clean up acid rain, according to scientists at Britain's Meteorological Office.

Global warming, evident over most of the rest of the planet in the past decade, has so far been 'slow or absent' over the northwest Atlantic and Western Europe, according to the conclusions of a revised assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released last week. A prime reason has been the shielding from the Sun's heat provided by sulphur emissions from power stations, one of the main sources of acid rain.

'The implication must be that, as countries clean up sulphur emissions to halt the damage from acid rain, temperatures will rise,' says Bruce Callander of the Meteorological Office, a leading member of the IPCC working group on the science of climate change.

Research published last year revealed for the first time ...

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